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couches, ate recycled food in featureless mess decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness and boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their spinout point to Hyperion.

Father Hoyt learned little from Father Dur during those days of forced intimacy, nothing at all about the events on Armaghast which had sent the senior priest into exile.

The younger man had keyed his comlog implant to seek out as much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the time they were three days out from planet fall, Father Hoyt considered himself somewhat of an expert on the world.

'There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no mention of a diocese there,' said Hoyt one evening as they hung talking in their zero-g hammocks while most of their fellow passengers lay tuned into erotic stimsims. '1 presume you're going down to do some mission work?" 'Not at all,' replied Father Dur. 'The good people of Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason to offend them with my proselytizing. Actually, I hope to travel to the southern continent- Aquila- and then find a way inland from the city of Port Romance.

But not in the guise of a missionary. I plan to set up an ethnological research station along the Cleft." 'Research?" Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed his eyes to key his implant. Looking again at Father Dur, he said, 'That section of the Pinion Plateau isn't inhabited, Father. The flame forests make it totally inaccessible most of the year."

Father Dur smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and his ancient condog had been in his luggage for the duration of the trip. 'Not quite inaccessible,' he said softly.

'And not quite uninhabited. The Bikura live there." 'Bikura,' Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. 'But they're just a legend,' he said at last.

'Hmmm,' said Father Dur. 'Try crossindexing through Mamet Spedling."

Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told him that Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor who, almost a standard century and a half earlier, had filed a short report with the Institute in which he told of hacking his way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance, through swamplands which had since been reclaimed for fiberplastic plantations, passing through the flame forests during a period of rare quietude, and climbing high enough on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a small tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.

Spedling's brief notes hypothesized that the humans were survivors of a missing seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation, inhreeding, and overadaptation. In Spedling's blunt words, '. · even after less than two days here it is obvious that the Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste time describing." As it turned out, the flame forests then began to show some signs of becoming active and Spedling had not wasted any more time observing his discovery but had rushed to reach the coast, losing four indigenie bearers, all of his equipment and records, and his left arm to the 'quiet' forest in the three months it took him to escape.

'My God,' Father Hoyt had said as he lay in his hammock on the Nadia Oleg, 'why the Bikura?" 'Why not?" had been Father Dur's mild reply. 'Very little is known about them." 'Very little is known about most of Hyperion,' said the younger priest, becoming somewhat agitated. 'What about the Time Tombs and the legendary Shrike north of the Bridle Range on Equus?" he said. 'They're famous!'

'Precisely,' said Father Dur6. 'Lenar, how many learned papers have been written on the Tombs and the Shrike creature?

Hundreds? Thousands?" The aging priest had tamped in tobacco and now lighted his pipe: no small feat in zero-g, Hoyt observed.

'Besides,' said Paul Dur6, 'even if